Sex, faith, denials: A Georgia Baptist college faces a reckoning

And now she had decided to tell someone about it — to ask White County’s sheriff to investigate one of the top administrators at Truett McConnell University, a small Baptist college and one of Cleveland’s biggest employers.

“OK,” the sergeant across the table said after he propped up a video camera to record their conversation. “What’s going on with you?”

“Yeah, um —,” Swinson started. “Yeah. I don’t know how to even begin.”

Swinson’s answer would set off a reckoning at Truett McConnell. She would tell the sergeant that the university’s vice president, Bradley Reynolds, distorted Scripture to pressure her into a sexual relationship without her consent. She would tell him that Reynolds proclaimed a vision from God that his wife would die and Swinson would take her place.

Swinson, now 34, would leave then-Sgt. Anthony Sims a thick stack of more than 300 emails that she told police Reynolds sent her. The emails, which investigators linked to Reynolds, mixed biblical teachings with sexual fantasies.

Confronted by an investigator, Reynolds would deny having a sexual relationship with Swinson and sending the messages. Reynolds has not been charged, but the district attorney has reopened the investigation. The state’s statute of limitations has expired on possible charges related to the sex allegations. Reynolds has not responded to requests for comment.

Eventually, Swinson’s story would get the attention of alumni, who would picket the campus. It would set off an uproar among the faculty, who would say they were left in the dark about their former boss. It would prompt the board of trustees to put Emir Caner, the university president, on leave until an outside investigation could determine who knew what when. Caner released a video denying that there was a cover-up to protect Reynolds. He has not responded to requests for comment.

But more than a year would pass before the public would hear what Swinson was telling Sims.

***

2008-2009

Swinson met Reynolds in a moment of personal transformation.

Swinson’s upbringing in southwest Georgia wasn’t religious so she didn’t go to Truett McConnell in 2008 for a Christian education. She was a soccer player, attracted by a scholarship. The school offering it happened to be deeply religious.

Around the same time, in 2009, Reynolds moved to Georgia from North Carolina, where he taught seminary and pastored a modest congregation. Caner, his former coworker, was Truett McConnell’s president. Reynolds had been offered a job as a vice president, overseeing the university’s academic programs.

Reynolds quickly adopted the women’s soccer team, Swinson and other students said. Swinson told Sims that it wasn’t unusual for professors to invite students into their homes. Reynolds and his wife had the team over for dinner and Bible studies. They offered a home away from home, inviting players to have a home-cooked meal, do laundry or get a break from campus.

Credit: Hyosub Shin / AJC

Credit: Hyosub Shin / AJC

Swinson took them up on the offer. And in time, she said, Reynolds asked if she “wanted to be discipled,” she recalled.

“It was like, ‘Yeah!’” she told Sims. “‘Don’t know nothing, but I’m ready.’”

Soon, Swinson added, she was coming over for one-on-one Bible studies. She’d have dinner with the family before she and Reynolds would go to the basement for her lessons. She sat on a couch while he stood at a whiteboard across the room, lecturing on Scripture. It was what she wanted: a roadmap to the faith she was eager to understand.

After their lessons, they prayed. Reynolds sat beside her, she recalled, and told her they were connected by God’s will.

***

Feb. 29, 2024

The emails from Reynolds began a year after Swinson graduated from Truett McConnell.

She had stayed on campus, she said, coaching soccer and picking up jobs around campus. Reynolds eventually created a position for her as a life coach reporting to him.

Credit: White Co. Sheriff's Dept.

Credit: White Co. Sheriff's Dept.

Reynolds, who was almost 22 years her senior, wrote that God was using him to help her grow spiritually and that it was God’s plan for them to be together so he could protect and serve her. He described a selfless, “agape love” for her. But, within a few months, the messages turned sexual.

December 29, 2013: “Just know that on our next theology lesson I am going to ravage your entire being with love:)”

January 3, 2014: “I can’t wait to let my spirit leap all over you next time we get to meet:)”

Swinson told Sims she couldn’t remember when their Bible studies turned sexual. But as they prayed during their sessions, she recalled, Reynolds began touching her: putting a hand on her back, then her knee and her chest, and eventually reaching into her shorts.

Credit: White Co. Sheriff's Dept.

Credit: White Co. Sheriff's Dept.

As Reynolds prayed, she recalled, he would say things like, “You don’t understand. You’re not going to understand. You’re a baby believer. This is from God.”

She didn’t want to be touched that way, she told Sims. But she was still learning who God was, and Reynolds insisted it was OK because she was his betrothed and it was God’s will that one day they would marry.

***

2013-2017

On campus, whispers about Reynolds and Swinson began to swirl.

One student, Abbey Booke, recalled seeing them get coffee together and drive off campus alone. Another, Jenna Eckstein, heard rumors about them soon after she enrolled in 2016.

Truett was a small school, after all. Gossip was hard to avoid.

And it made some faculty uncomfortable.

Credit: YouTube

Credit: YouTube

Veronica Respress, a math professor, told the AJC she confronted Reynolds after she saw him go into Swinson’s apartment alone. But she said Reynolds brushed her off, saying he was just helping Swinson with chores. She was like a daughter to him, Respress recalled him saying.

Edward Pruitt, a Christian studies professor who has since left the university, told the AJC he took his concerns to Caner, the university president, after he saw Reynolds and Swinson drive off campus together.

“He said, ‘Ed, there’s nothing to it. It’s none of your business. Drop it,’” Pruitt recalled, adding: “I could tell by the tone of his voice he was not happy that I had mentioned that.”

Credit: Truett McConnell University

Credit: Truett McConnell University

Many of the reports from students and staff reached Vice President of Student Services Chris Eppling, who oversaw the university’s Title IX program to investigate sexual harassment complaints.

Eppling said students told him they saw Reynolds’ BMW at Swinson’s apartment late at night. A student working security told him they drove onto campus in the middle of the night. He received photos of their cars parked at Reynolds’ house when no one else was home, he said.

Eppling took a manila envelope of the photos to Caner in 2016, he told the AJC. He said the president seemed “visibly distressed” about the rumors and mentioned possibly firing Reynolds.

But days later, Eppling recalled, Caner’s tone had changed after speaking with a trustee and a local pastor: He instructed Eppling not to investigate further or take photos at Reynolds’ house. Caner said he had handled it and Eppling would have to trust him.

Reynolds described the situation in an email to Swinson. He wrote that Caner promised to warn Eppling that “any more gossip like that, will result in the person saying it being fired.”

***

Feb. 29, 2024

At the sheriff’s office, Swinson told Sims she had felt trapped in her relationship with Reynolds, confused by the way he mixed Scripture and sex.

She told the officer that Reynolds had professed that God brought him dreams about their future. Reynolds had told her that his wife, whom he’d met as her youth pastor, would die and that Swinson would take her place in his family. He had called it God’s will, she said.

Then, she said, Reynolds had taken this belief a step further: He asserted that while they weren’t married, God had given them freedoms to have sex. It was OK, she recalled him saying, because he had made a vow of “betrothal” before God. She hadn’t understood what he meant, she said, and she hadn’t wanted a physical relationship.

Credit: White Co. Sheriff's Dept.

Credit: White Co. Sheriff's Dept.

The relationship followed a cycle, she said. Reynolds would make a sexual advance, then apologize and promise that next time they’d just study the Bible. She said he would follow through for a time before trying again a few months later.

In the years before she walked into the sheriff’s office, Swinson told Sims she’d had flashbacks to dark memories of her visits to the Reynolds’ home:

She remembered Reynolds joining her in the shower, though she had locked the door.

Staying in the family’s guest room, she remembered waking up to find Reynolds on top of her, “touching every part of my body but still saying it’s from God.”

And after a Bible study, she remembered freezing up when Reynolds asked her to pray on the floor. She remembered him pulling down her shorts and urging her to let him penetrate her.

“There’s no part of me that wanted this, consented to it,” she told Sims. “I just wanted to know Jesus. I didn’t know who God was. I was so confused, and I felt so trapped through it all.”

Credit: White Co. Sheriff's Dept.

Credit: White Co. Sheriff's Dept.

The emails she brought to the sheriff’s office indicate that Reynolds noticed her discomfort. He wrote that he regretted making her pull away.

October 20, 2014: “It’s almost like you don’t desire us to visit one on one like we used to.”

January 30, 2015: “I’m supposed to be the safest place in the world for you. To be what God made me to be. And yet somehow I read you wrong and made you uncomfortable.”

In one of the few emails Swinson sent back, she told him she had just wanted to have Bible study and learn. She didn’t want to “say no again and again,” she wrote in May 2016.

Credit: White Co. Sheriff's Dept.

Credit: White Co. Sheriff's Dept.

Reynolds responded that he was hurt she didn’t believe him that their relationship was God’s will and said he wouldn’t “try anything now that I know you think it is all sin.”

“If I was wrong then God plays with hearts and He did with mine,” Reynolds wrote. “If I was wrong I am the most deceptive person you’ve met. I’m manipulative and evil.”

Months later, Reynolds wrote that he prayed he wouldn’t be attracted to Swinson anymore unless it was God’s will — and if it was, he prayed that Swinson “would enjoy it some again.”

“I am just asking you to be open that perhaps God is answering my prayer that you kinda enjoyed it just a little,” he wrote in September 2016, “even though you feel upset afterward.”

***

2018-2021

Swinson increasingly grew uncomfortable and confused by her interactions with Reynolds, she told the AJC, and began searching for other spiritual outlets.

She was still living in Cleveland when she began attending services at Passion City Church in Atlanta, more than an hour away. It was as though her body was trying to get away, she said.

Finally, in 2018, she left her job at Truett McConnell to move closer.

Around that time, she sent Reynolds an email telling him why she’d pulled away. She wrote that she felt like a victim and said, “Every time I’m touched, To me it is wrong.”

“I think what pushed the pain to another level was every time I would finally get courage to say something like this, You kept trying,” Swinson wrote.

The move to Atlanta was challenging, she told the AJC. At times, she only had a few dollars in her bank account.

“I didn’t care if I was homeless,” she said. “I will never go back there. I don’t care.”

She got a job working at Passion City, but she struggled with flashbacks and nightmares about her time on campus. The church’s “care team” helped her find a therapist, and she began to see her relationship with Reynolds in a new light.

Her therapist wrote a letter to Swinson’s attorney describing the way her thinking had shifted:

She reported having “memories of abuse” from her boss and pastor on staff at her school …

She reported feeling rage, disgust, numbness, terror as these memories surfaced.

She reported that … this was the first time she realized she had been “manipulated and preyed upon.”

“I understood that I was groomed. I understood that I was targeted, understood that I was spiritually manipulated, abused and even raped by someone who was a pastor and a vice president,” Swinson told the AJC. “All of that language didn’t even come out until counseling.”

It would take her another two-and-a-half years to decide to drive to the sheriff’s office, but finally, she said, she decided to expose the darkness she experienced.

***

Feb. 29, 2024

Sims listened intently to Swinson’s story.

“Even though you’re an adult, I mean, it’s just inappropriate,” the officer told her.

He added: “Using God and prayer and stuff like that, that’s the worst of the worst of this kind of stuff.”

But his questions revealed the challenges he would face in building a case. He asked if she was underage when their relationship began, but she hadn’t been. He asked if she’d ever said no or pushed Reynolds away when he touched her, but she said she hadn’t. She said she would “go inward and just try to disappear.”

“When someone’s telling you, ‘This is from God’ —” Swinson said in response to one of the questions. “I felt violated, but how — how do you, like, navigate manipulation like that?”

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez / AJC

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez / AJC

Cases like Swinson’s are often written off, said David Pooler, a Baylor University professor who studies sexual abuse by clergy. When they involve two adults, they’re frequently dismissed as consensual despite the imbalance of power when someone is regarded as a spiritual authority, he said.

Fourteen states have made it a crime for a member of the clergy to have sex with someone they pastor, but Georgia is not one of them.

***

March 1, 2024

Less than 24 hours after Swinson left the interrogation room, Reynolds walked in. He said he didn’t know why Sims had summoned him.

Leaning against the small table, he wore a look of confusion as Sims asked him: “Do you know Hayle Swinson?”

She had been a soccer player at Truett McConnell, Reynolds answered — a “friend of the family.”

“What else can you tell me about Hayle?” Sims asked a moment later.

“What can you tell me?” Reynolds responded.

“So, I know that you had a sexual relationship with her,” Sims said.

“No, I have not,” Reynolds answered.

He repeated his denial twice more before Sims flipped through a stack of papers and picked up the emails Swinson brought in the day before. The officer read aloud graphic descriptions from the messages.

“I don’t have a clue what that’s from,” Reynolds said.

“These are emails that you sent Hayle,” Sims responded.

“No, they are not,” Reynolds said, beginning to raise his voice.

The two men spoke in circles: Reynolds, growing exasperated, insisted he hadn’t sent the emails. Sims tersely insisted that he had.

Credit: White Co. Sheriff's Dept.

Credit: White Co. Sheriff's Dept.

Reynolds said he didn’t recognize the Yahoo account that bore his name. He pleaded with Sims to trace the IP address they came from and insisted he was framed. He said his enemies had been trying to get him fired for years. He said Swinson and Sims were both lying. He said the investigator would owe him an apology.

In turn, Sims grew heated. The investigator said he could tell Reynolds was lying. He said it sounded like Reynolds should be fired. He said that perhaps the two of them should drive across town and have a talk with Truett McConnell’s president.

Finally, Reynolds got up to leave. But before he left, Sims reached across the table and took Reynolds’ cellphone from his hand. The officer hadn’t yet gotten a search warrant, records show, but Sims asserted the phone would have to stay.

Hours later, Truett McConnell’s faculty received a cryptic email from Caner, the president: Reynolds is taking a leave of absence for “personal reasons,” it said. It didn’t explain why.

He never returned.

***

2019-2022

The sheriff’s office confrontation may have driven Reynolds from Truett McConnell, but it was not the university’s first warning about him.

In 2019, a student named Brynna Frantz submitted a petition raising concerns about how Reynolds behaved with students, his references to sex during class and his assignments. Students asked that he no longer teach the theology course or instead be monitored in the classroom.

Frantz told the AJC that Reynolds gave a writing assignment that asked students to describe their past trauma, which she felt invaded her privacy. She wrote about past sexual abuse, and he pressed her to come into his office to talk about it.

“I felt incredibly uncomfortable, triggered by the situation, because I was like, he’s asking us to dip into some really major stuff,” she said.

Credit: Natrice Miller / AJC

Credit: Natrice Miller / AJC

Frantz decided to ask the university to intervene, and on a campus with fewer than 900 full-time students, she said she had no problem finding dozens of women to sign the petition.

Frantz took the petition to two university staffers who lived in her dorm. Both endorsed the petition based on their own experiences with Reynolds and got it to Eppling.

Eppling told the AJC he gave the petition to Robby Foster, the board of trustees chairman. And in a letter to Foster and another trustee soon thereafter, Eppling bluntly documented several concerns about Reynolds. He wrote that he feared that Reynolds’ behavior would undermine Caner’s leadership but hoped speaking up would help put the university “back on a path where we can honor the Lord.”

Foster recently told a reporter: “Chris (Eppling) did share with me that he gave me a list of complaints that I went over with Dr. Caner, but I did not remember the petition.” He declined to comment further.

In the letter, Eppling described a campus where faculty and students were afraid to challenge Reynolds: “Easily over 20” women had complained that they wanted Reynolds to stop hugging them but were afraid to say something. At least six women had told Eppling they didn’t want to take theology class because Reynolds taught it. And multiple professors wanted to call a vote of no confidence in Reynolds but feared Caner and the board wouldn’t protect them.

“Those who speak against the leadership have been subject to reprisals of varying degrees already,” Eppling wrote.

Eppling himself worried about the personal consequences of his letter.

“I believe that in sending this to you, it represents the beginning of the end of my employment here at TMU,” he wrote. “I hope that I am wrong in that. I guess only time will tell.”

***

Eppling, who headed student services, pushed for his department to conduct a formal Title IX investigation into the students’ complaints.

But he was rebuffed. Foster, the board chair, told him Caner wanted it to be handled in-house by another department.

“This is not an HR issue, it is in fact a Title IX issue,” Eppling wrote Foster and another leader. “Title IX is a federal regulation that carries with it the weight of law, and has a definitive process and procedure that must be followed.”

Even if the students’ discomfort didn’t prompt a Title IX investigation, it should have triggered the university to take action, said Kayleigh Baker of TNG Consulting, which advises colleges on Title IX. The university should have pursued the complaints, asked questions and considered if Reynolds should be in the classroom, she added.

But when Eppling checked in with students later that year, they told him no one had contacted them, he said.

In 2022, Eppling was fired. He said he still doesn’t know why.

Credit: Hyosub Shin / AJC

Credit: Hyosub Shin / AJC

“I was devastated that you could take a list of women telling you, ‘I feel unsafe. I feel uncomfortable,’ and not even ask a single question,” Frantz said.

None of the women kept a copy of the petition. Brianna Lewallen, one of the staffers given the petition, said she didn’t think she needed one. She trusted the board to investigate. But when nothing changed, she said her trust in institutions and leaders was shaken, at Truett McConnell and beyond.

“I think that’s probably the first time in my story that I felt like our voices didn’t matter as women,” Lewallen said.

Concerns about Reynolds persisted. Two years later, in 2021, the university opened a Title IX investigation into Reynolds after a student said he touched her inappropriately in a classroom.

The lawyer who investigated the complaint for the university concluded the allegation “does not rise to the level of sexual harassment” and recommended the complaint be dismissed. His investigation included interviews with students who said they had been warned about Reynolds by others, according to his formal report. And the student who filed the complaint said she’d been cautioned about Reynolds by at least half a dozen classmates.

They told her not to go to his office alone.

***

March-May 2024

Soon after his confrontation with Reynolds, Sims obtained a warrant and sent his phone to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for analysis.

The contents, Sims wrote in his report, undercut Reynolds’ denials. He and Swinson had exchanged thousands of text messages, records show. And there on his phone was the same email address he told Sims he’d never heard of.

“It is clear from the emails and text messages Brad and Swinson had a long relationship,” Sims wrote.

Credit: White Co. Sheriff's Dept.

Credit: White Co. Sheriff's Dept.

Weeks later, Sims decided to close the case. It is a felony in Georgia to lie to law enforcement, but Sims didn’t recommend any charges.

The investigator wrote he didn’t believe there was enough evidence to prosecute Reynolds.

***

May 2024

Swinson was devastated.

She’d felt God wanted her to come forward, but her efforts had been shut down. She said she was close to giving up.

“God, defend me, defend your name,” she told the AJC she prayed. “Your name was misused to me.”

Then a church friend introduced her to Marcia Shein, a Decatur attorney who said she was troubled by Swinson’s story and volunteered to investigate it. Shein had attended a Christian college herself and said it was “God’s calling” that she help.

This past February, she sent Truett McConnell’s board of trustees a 16-page letter detailing her findings.

Shein wrote that she had uncovered a pattern of the university failing to act to protect women on campus and criticized Caner for failing to protect Swinson even after he was alerted by other administrators.

She alleged that a culture of fear and guilt deterred women from coming forward. From her interviews with students, she alleged that Reynolds asking students to write about trauma allowed him to identify vulnerable students.

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez / AJC

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez / AJC

Shein said she met with Truett McConnell’s lawyer soon after she sent the letter. She was hopeful they would work out a positive outcome. Then, she said, she stopped hearing back.

Their next move, she and Swinson decided, would be to go public.

***

May 29, 2025

A year after she told her story in the sheriff’s interrogation room, Swinson went public with her story on The Roys Report, a Christian media outlet.

It called out Caner and the university’s leadership.

The article and a podcast video of Swinson’s interview with reporter Julie Roys provoked a swift reaction.

The Roys Report obtained and posted a video by Caner defending his administration but also voicing sympathy for Swinson: “My family and I and all of us hurt for Hayle Swinson and the sin that was so grievous against her,” he said.

He added: “While there was no cover-up, there was no Title IX filed or an HR complaint, there was no petition that ever came across my desk, we have to do better, because these are our students. These are people of our family. We have to find the cracks and the fissures that we must have missed.”

At an all-hands meeting, Truett McConnell’s staff grilled the administration, according to a recording of the meeting: They asked how university leaders could have missed Reynolds’ relationship with Swinson, why they didn’t get more training on Title IX and why the school wouldn’t acknowledge past concerns about Reynolds.

In a letter to the board, the university’s academic leaders called for transparency after they said they had been left in the dark about their boss’s abrupt departure. It was unacceptable, they wrote, that they learned about “a sexual predator in our midst” from the news.

Trustees called a meeting days later. Alumni protested outside, holding signs with slogans like, “TRUTH IS IMMORTAL.”

Credit: Heather Pillsbury

Credit: Heather Pillsbury

Inside, the board voted to hire an outside investigator and put Caner on leave.

Across town, the uproar got the attention of White County’s district attorney, Jeff Langley.

Langley said he doesn’t know if his office’s reexamination of the case will ultimately result in charges, but he said he hasn’t ruled them out.

In a statement to the AJC on Monday, Truett McConnell said it had taken steps to bolster its Title IX program, including making Title IX coordinator a full-time position, requiring training for students and employees and forming a committee to review its processes. The university created a “see something, say something” program with signs encouraging students to come forward. And it said its board may implement additional changes when trustees receive the investigator’s report in September.

“Individuals found to have violated University policies are no longer employed at TMU,” the university said. It added that Reynolds’ employment ended in March 2024.

Going public left Swinson drained and anxious but committed to going forward, she told the AJC.

“I feel just a deep, deep heaviness, but also a quiet strength,” Swinson said. “I knew it would cost something, but I also knew I couldn’t stay silent.”

As the reactions unfolded at Truett McConnell, Swinson said she believed stories like hers needed to be heard to produce lasting change. She said she hoped her story would yield change at Truett McConnell, prompt Georgia lawmakers to make clergy sex abuse a crime and give other victims “courage one day to do the same” — or at least begin healing.

“I’ve done what I believe God has asked me to do, and the outcome is in His hands,” she said.

Just as she had when she walked into the sheriff’s office, she said, she felt called to “bring the darkness into light.”

AJC data journalist Jennifer Peebles and reporter Uma Bhat contributed to this report.